You, too, can easily predict Boeing crashes! (A serious and in depth discussion on Boeing, ULA, NASA, and the future of spaceflight)

Good day fellow regards,

First of all, y'all are wild! A lazy Saturday morning tongue-in-cheek shitpost about Boeing and the NASA press conference has a lot of you wearing tin foil hats, but man Stevie Wonder saw this coming on Thursday. No, there’s no “insider trading” or outing my dad, or any other wacky ideas you have. Here, I'll walk you through it:

2014 – NASA announces the
ISS CCP contract, awarding both Boeing ($4.2 bil) and SpaceX ($2.6 bil) getting
the actual final contracts, with first flights targeted for 2017. Space-X
develops the Dragon, launches on the Falcon 9, massive success, yada yada, you
know the story. Boeing meanwhile buys Atlas V rockets (from itself at ULA) to
fly their Starliner, which we'll get back to in a bit.

Starliner's unmanned OFT1 test flight came 2 years late in 2019 and was an absolute shitshow start to finish. So bad, in fact, that NASA required a second unmanned OFT2 test flight, which Boeing didn't complete until 2022, and was also a total failure (remember that it tried launching in 2021 and couldn’t, and a crew abort system test was required afterwards). There was a lot of speculation that an OFT3 was needed,
but NASA kind of surprised everyone by letting the Astronauts go up on the
current CFT1 mission this summer, albeit with highly experienced NASA
astronauts on board, and not Boeing’s crew (for reasons that are highly
apparent now).

The ISS is a menagerie of disparate modules strapped together with next to no standardization. There’s an excellent USA Today article that came out a couple of weeks ago: https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/08/15/nasa-starliner-astronauts-iss/74590421007/ That means that until the Starliner is jettisoned, nobody else was coming up. The writing was on the wall on 8/16 when Boeing quietly announced that it was in talks to sell ULA to Sierra https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/boeing-lockheed-martin-talks-sell-ula-sierra-space-2024-08-16/

Thursday NASA announced it was holding the final decision press conference on Saturday at 1 PM ET – https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/leadership-to-discuss-nasas-boeing-crew-flight-test/ This is where even Stevie Wonder saw the final decision. Ask yourself if you’ve ever known a government worker to come in on a Saturday? And why would NASA hold that conference at that date and time unless it was bad news for their publicly-traded contractor? You should have all been calling your nana’s puts or whatever the heck it is you do (I’m only here for the memes and spaceflight chatter, I dunno why you like space company stocks, but that’s how I got here)

And seriously, this decision has been predicted for weeks by the likes of NASASpaceflightNow and Ars Technica (who have amazing Rocket Reports, highly recommended – https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/rocket-report-a-ula-sale-tidbit-polaris-dawn-mission-is-on-deck/ )

That brings us to the actual announcement of SpaceX to the rescue (in the words of Billie Eilish, duh) – https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-starliner-spacecraft-back-to-earth-without-crew/ The more telling piece in this announcement, is that there will be a 3-week lag time between Starliner undocking and the SpaceX Crew 9 launch. History students of NASA will recognize that as an abnormally large amount of time to leave the ISS manned with a single lifeboat (Crew 8), especially one that does not exactly have the space (or space suits) for all the astronauts onboard. The fact that NASA thinks it’s less risky to keep so many people on the ISS without adequate lifeboat coverage for such duration is frankly pretty huge. Let’s talk about what that means.

First, why did NASA not require the 3^rd unmanned test with so many issues on the 2 OFT’s? Well, remember the Atlas V thing? ULA builds the Atlas V and announced in 2021 that it was getting retired, and finished the last production rockets earlier this year. All 15 Atlas V’s left have been spoken for, and that includes all of Boeing’s ISS CCP missions (only 6).

Well, NASA also announced that the ISS is being shut down and de-orbited in 2030 – https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-international-space-station-us-deorbit-vehicle/ which isn’t that far away. NASA has more or less 6 years of needs to service the ISS at this point, and it will absolutely take Boeing at least 2 years to get the next mission ready, which let’s face it, will be a test again. (Two of the board members on the safety panel for this mission were on the Columbia panel and were overruled, they are damn well not going to let that happen again).

Well ULA is already contracted with Amazon for some of it’s Kuiper constellation of satellites, on those aforementioned Atlas V’s. It makes far more financial sense at this point for Boeing to wash it’s hands of the Starliner (which is a cost-plus contract $1.4 bil over budget so far) and sell those remaining 6 ULA Atlas V’s to Amazon and/or other highest bidders, and use those pumped numbers to help sell off ULA (or at least for Boeing to exit and leave ULA entirely in Lockheed’s hands, which isn’t a bad play for either of them). Boeing leaving is so much more than Starliner, as they are the contractor for the Space Launch System (lol wsb won't me use it's real acronym cause it's a stock) Block 2 EUS ($2.4 bil already and they haven’t even built one), and even bigger yet, they are the contractor for the Space Launch System Block 1 Core Stages, which frankly is a deep dive all on it’s own. Suffice it to say, Boeing has received at least $10 bil for the 1^st of the 6 of these it needs to supply, and then after that the Block 2 Core Stage will be a Boeing/Grumman concern (of which Grumman can easily handle on it’s own).

Boeing has it’s fingers in a lot of the future NASA missions, but almost all of them involve much more highly experienced partners that can take over, and the two sole Boeing products (Starliner and Block 1 Cores) can be respectively canceled, and paired back (we don’t even have enough RS-25 engines to build the last 2 Cores, and only 2-4 are in production right now, it would be super easy to stop at 4)

So, stonks then. This mission has been a *very* public demonstration of technical ineptitude that has captured the attention of the American media and public. To paraphrase, 2 deaths is a tragedy, 346 deaths is statistics. To the general public, a couple of crashes overseas by airlines they never heard of isn’t going to move the needle like 2 certified American heroes being stranded in space, and yes, stranded is the right word. I have no idea what the BA stock will do (nor do I care, my position is 0 and always been, same with dear old dad), that’s for you apes to prognosticate.

I predict (based on the very publicly available “insider information” that is government contracts and NASA press releases), that NASA and Boeing will announce a cancellation of Starliner (and likely blame it on the short amount of time ISS has left and lack of need for the 6, nay 5, service missions), followed by more news on Boeing pulling the plug on all of it’s NASA commitments one joint venture at a time. Does that make Lockheed, Grumman, Sierra, and Blue Origin look more attractive for investment? And will Boeing “crash” because of filthy normals calling their brokers to sell, or will it go up based on selling off all their unprofitable spaceflight work to concentrate on building convertible airplanes? I dunno, you tell me down below.

Thanks for the wild ride and good luck with nana’s money. I’m going to go talk to dad about de-orbiting this hunk of junk and other space safety nerd stuff.